Book review: Kishalay Bhattacharjee, Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230231203793 |
| Author | Jigyasa Sogarwal |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
Book Reviews 347
as ‘Hindu-dominated’, ‘Muslim-dominated’ and ‘mixed areas.’ The dominant understanding of homeland
as a territorial nation-state by national leaders prevailed over a popular local imagination that all
communities, including minorities, have the right to practise religion and culture with dignity. This is why
the idea of partition or a separate state for Hindus and Muslims had local manifestations in terms of
increased tensions between communities, leading to demarcations of routes for passage of religious
processions, and the confinement of the slaughter, sales and consumption of meat to Muslim localities in
Shahjahanabad (i.e., ‘Old Delhi’). Special ‘Muslim zones’ had to be created for the protection of minority
Muslims who had chosen to stay in India after partition. Conflicts with Pakistan in the post-colonial period
produced the discourse of Muslim localities as ‘mini-Pakistans’ that needed to be ‘Indianized’: controlled,
dispersed or cleared, in order to ensure the security of Indian nation state.
Parveen’s core argument is persuasive and well supported. However, the narrative sometimes appears
to be too neat. The descriptions could have been enriched by the inclusion of instances in which both the
majority and minority communities resisted these communal categorizations. In Parveen’s account, the
‘ghetto’ resulting from forced segregation emerges as the dominant category of spatial form inhabited by
Muslims in Delhi. Other kinds of forms preferred by upper-class Muslims, such as enclaves (referring to
more intentional forms of segregation) and citadels (marked by deliberate attempts to distance from
poorer co-religionists) that complicate the narrative of marginality of ‘Muslim localities’, have not been
dwelled upon. Instead of a passing reference, details on such other segregated spatial forms in Delhi
could have made the analysis more nuanced.
This book makes an important contribution in understanding the historical context of the contemporary
problem of cultural and spatial marginality of Muslim minorities in post-colonial cities. Its writing is
clear and accessible for a wide audience, ranging beyond academics to activists, and concerned citizens
who are interested in the spatial reordering in Indian cities, especially in Delhi.
ORCID iD
Shruti Dubey https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5257-807X
Shruti Dubey
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi, India
E-mail: sdubey@bhu.ac.in
Kishalay Bhattacharjee, Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism. New Delhi:
Orient BlackSwan, 2023, 287 pages, `950.
DOI: 10.1177/23210230231203793
Recent literature on the idea of citizenship in India has mostly focused on the legal and moral aspects of
statelessness, for which ideas of territoriality, boundedness, law and documentation remain central
factors. With citizenship, seen as a relationship between the state and its people, even critical works have
most often used the state and its apparatus as their lens. Kishalay Bhattacharjee’s book inverts this state-
centric gaze, as indicated by ‘citizen accounts’ in the title. It is a detailed exploration of the substantive
aspect of citizenship including emotional identifications and cultural value systems. His book is an
attempt to engage with the idea of belonging and everyday citizenship experience from the perspective
of the citizen.
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